In an age of rampant globalisation the study
of geopolitics assumes a crucial, and urgent, significance. While
geopolitical considerations have always ruled imperial structures in the
past, the present state of international politics, where America
postures on the world-stage as sole hegemon, demands a renewed attention
to the historical, economic, cultural and spiritual bases of the major
empires of the European mainland. After the last great war, the main
counterpoise to the ambitious American international enterprise has been
the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation. Western
Europe, however, has been hampered in its natural development as the
matrix of "western civilisation" - which includes the Russian and the
American - by the severe calamities it suffered in the two world-wars.

Steuckers'
essays, which complement the Russian Eurasianist works, are therefore
of particular importance in emphasising the western European role in a
new world-order that will be directed not by the self-aggrandisement of
capitalistic states but by the historical maturity requisite for genuine
cultural development within and outside Europe.

jeudi 25 août 2016

Visions of Europe in the Napoleonic Era

By Robert Steuckers, Translation by Alexander Jacob

Visions of Europe in the Napoleonic Era, excerpt from Chapter 2 of The European Enterprise: Geopolitical Essays

The visions of a unified and autarkic
Europe do not date from Locarno and Aristide Briand, nor from the Second
World War, nor from the founding fathers of the European Communities.
They have had antecedents from the age of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment. A good number of conceptions were specified in the
Napoleonic era.

Europe in the view of the Enlightenment is:

• A space of “civilisation” and “good taste”.
• A civilisation marked by decline and maladaptation (due
to rising industrialisation).
• A civilisation where reason is in decline.
• A civilisation marked by Gallomania and destabilised by
the national reactions to this omnipresent Gallomania.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment
already considered Europe to be stuck between Russia and America. They
were divided into Russophiles and Russiphobes. All however considered
America as a New Europe begun on the other side of the Atlantic and
where multiple opportunities were waiting to be cultivated.

The Enlightenment and Herder

Within the framework of the Enlightenment
and the ubiquitous Gallomania, Herder developed a critical vision of
the intellectual situation in Europe and reflected deeply on the
significance of the historical individuality of collective
constructions, the fruits of long maturation defined and fashioned over
time. He posited the bases of a positive critique of Gallomania as an
artificial cult of imitated Greco-Roman styles to the exclusion of all
others, particularly of the mediaeval Gothic. Rousseau agreed with this
view and saw history as a harmonious dialectic between the nations and
the world but esteemed that Europe in decline, behind the neoclassical
façades of the 18th century, was morally condemnable because it was
perverse and corrupt. Herder wished to re-establish more rooted popular
cultures, revive autochthonous cultures which the processes of
urbanisation and rationalisation typical of civilisation had
marginalised or thwarted. For him Europe was a family of nations (of
peoples). Contrarily to Rousseau, he esteemed that Europe is not
condemnable in itself but that it should consolidate itself and not
export to Russia and America an abstract Europeism with a Greco-Roman
veneer, the expression of a rootless artificiality permitting all manner
of manipulations and engendering despotism. Herder knew Europe
physically and sensually having travelled from Riga to Nantes,
peregrinations about which he has left us a diary teeming with
observations relating to the attitudes of the 18th century. He compares
in detail the regional cultures of the countries that he travelled
through, poses a series of diagnostics combining assessments of decline
with hopes of recovery – the recovery of a people through the
resurrection of their language, their traditions and the roots of their
literature. On the basis of this lived experience he wished to make of
the Baltic countries, his homeland, and the Ukraine (along with the
Crimea) the workshop of a renovated Europe which would be respectful of
both the classical Greek models (but especially Homeric; Herder fully
rehabilitates Homeric Greece providing an impetus to later philological
researches) and faithful to its non-Greek and non- Roman, mediaeval and
barbarian (Slavic and Germanic) ones.

This renovated Europe will be forged by the intervention of a new
system of education much more attentive than its predecessors to the
most ancient roots, of legal entities, of the law, the physical history
of peoples, etc. In this sense, the Europe hoped for by Herder must be
not a society of states constituted of persons but a “community of
national personalities”.

After the troubles and upheavals of the
French Revolution, after Napoleon’s accession to power, many European
political observers began to view Europe as a “Continental Bloc”
(Bertrand de Jouvenal published a work on this subject). With the
continental blockade the idea of a European economic autarky
progressively took shape. It has had especially French proponents but
also many German partisans like Dalberg, Krause or the poet Jean
Paul80 (whose direct descendant in the 20th century would be another
poet Rudolf Pannwitz).